this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

snrk

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I might be wrong but this sounds like a quick way to make the web worse by putting a huge computational load on your machine for the purpose of privacy inside customer service chat bots that nobody wants. Please correct me if I’m wrong

WebLLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine that brings language model inference directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU.

WebLLM is fully compatible with OpenAI API. That is, you can use the same OpenAI API on any open source models locally, with functionalities including streaming, JSON-mode, function-calling (WIP), etc.

We can bring a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU acceleration.

https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I do believe that’s the chrome-only horseshit that Proton uses for their local LLM, and reputedly it’s very slow and fairly unreliable

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

chrome-only

The whole concept of responsive really died in the arse with the onset of the full stack web developer.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

the web platform is great!

  • your apps run everywhere (that a modern version of chrome runs)
  • every API is pointlessly terrible because your app is simultaneously a document and an Angular monstrosity
  • progressive enhancement! (is dead and they’re Weekend at Bernie’s-ing the body around knowing most web developers won’t notice)
  • it’s an open platform! (controlled almost entirely by Google, with Apple’s only role being to slow down the terrible fucking ideas coming out of the standards process, and all other parties being effectively Google mouthpieces)
[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

Did you ever see that A16z funded startup that was making a web browser that streamed the web for an intermediary server? It was fucken wild

Edit, I guess it was yc funded? https://jacobhrussell.com/blog/mighty

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Mighty comes in at $30 with a 9% discount with a 12 month prepayment. I don’t think Mighty is for everyone. […] However, for people who use resource intensive applications regularly and either prefer or don’t mind using web apps it seems like a no-brainer. I think there is also a legitimate argument for corporations to provide Mighty for their employees purely based on the productivity boost, especially for tech employees.

It might be hard to get purists to buy into the “browser = OS” value proposition, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying my 40 GB of RAM.

oh it’s the web operating system again! things that make a web browser an operating system:

  • it’s extremely expensive every month
  • it rehashes the awful cloud rendering browser shit Amazon tried and gave up on for their underpowered Kindle tablets
  • it bundles a bunch of basic shit you can do in ordinary browser plugins
  • 40GB of RAM and 8 virtual cores! (that’s all? my current work machine unfortunately has 64GB, and my desktop from 2020 is a 32+32GB split between native and a VM. 8 KVM cores is also not fantastic. none of this should be required for a fucking web browser though but here we are)
  • it’s using a data center’s fantastic internet connection which is probably why it’s quick, but it of course requires a perfectly stable connection on your end or it’s gonna suck
[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

One other thing, also correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a giant key logger as well?

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago

…huh, that is true! so another bullet point and this one’s shared by more than one “web operating system”:

  • it irrevocably breaks the browser’s security model implementing pointless functionality

in this case it’s pretty bad, cause it’s got the same issue as all hosted VMs in that if the host or hypervisor is compromised so are all the VMs, but also effectively anyone on Mighty’s side with access to the event stream would have enough data to compromise your entire existence

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago

Haha no way! Turns out the founder pivoted to AI 5 months after that article was published https://xcancel.com/suhail/status/1591813110230568963

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052

@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.

For your delectation, here are the HN comments

I'm in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.

Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.

There's not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.

Here's the lobste.rs disucssion:

Well that's quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. "Remember that thing everyone said wouldn't happen? Well it still hasn't happened! 🫨"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.

Here's something I've never heard of before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

Moravec wrote in 1988: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers[...]"

Apparently he had GPT back then!

Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.

So to throw my totally-amateur two cents in, it seems like it's definitely part of the discussion in actual AI circles based on the for-public-consumption reading and viewing I've done over the years, though I've never heard it mentioned by name. I think a bigger part of the explanation has less to do with human cognition (it's probably fallacious to assume that AI of any method effectively reproduces those processes) and more to do with the more abstract cognitive tests and games being much more formally defined. Our perception and model of a game of Chess or Go may not be complete enough to solve the game, but it is bounded by the explicitly-defined rules of the game. If your opponent tries to work outside of those bounds by, say, flipping the board over and storming off, the game itself can treat that as a simple forfeit-by-cheating. But our understanding of the real world is not similarly bounded. Things that were thought to be impossible happen with impressive frequency, and our brain is clearly able to handle this somehow. That lack of boundedness requires different capabilities than just being able to operate within expected parameters like existing English GenAI or image generators, I suspect relating to handling uncertainty or lacking information. The assumption that what AI is doing is a mirror to the living mind is wholly unproven.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

oh i dunno, there was

Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The best way to unearth sneers is to state "there are no sneers here"

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

David took it as a personal challenge

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago

given it was first comment when i looked, it was Find Dumb Bro Shit On HN mode

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don't know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

amazing work they've achieved so far though

yes, that's the complete change set for the fork

oh and a Godot discord moderator turned out to be extremely into dropping n-words in chat

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn't a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)

I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went 'any devs wanna take over this fork?' Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 9 hours ago (3 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The bikeshed should be RED!

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Apologies for crappy nitpicking on my part, but 4chan millennials really gotta learn to let go of impact font.

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I want to pull quotes from that thread but it’s so satisfying in context to see the most toxic parts of a gaming community turn on each other

and dear god are those some ugly fucking logos. my favorite is the one that’s just Redot Engine with a ridiculously overbearing letter R (not gonna repost them here for obvious trademark reasons — I’ve got the feeling these fellas might not have that part figured out)

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 8 hours ago

I was too busy poking fun at them and posted them here

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

found it: https://bsky.app/profile/gamingonlinux.com/post/3l5ca3blqgn2y

The idiots claimed using game engines was le wokisme and Godot took the piss, and Grummz ran with it

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago

Holy shit that is amazing. The thinnest skins. All of this over the promise by God not to flood the world again.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

wait, the “pre-built” engine these little shits are trying to bully a developer for using is fucking Unreal Engine 5?

all wokes want is to use a notoriously advanced and difficult game engine owned by a right-wing asshole and that’s how they’re gonna destroy gaming. with the engine that gigantic studios use because writing an engine from scratch is a fucking money pit that never ends and you have to have a good fucking reason to do it

also I’ve been trying to force my hands to not start a Bevy project ever since Tiny Glade (a beautiful, cozy 3D sandbox builder running on the Bevy engine) launched and Bevy is manual as hell (but fun to work with), so this is a good reminder that Godot is cool and I should finally learn it too

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

also, holy fuck the reply guys are a plague on that post. is bluesky normally like that, or is it the blast radius from the gamers deciding they have a problem?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

dunno if i have an unusual amount of blocked posters, but the ones i can see are fine? bsky is largely le home of le wokisme

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

that’s probably it — logged out mastodon is probably just as bad. also the most aggressive reply guy’s take is “accounts for public projects should never block anyone and they should be required to debate the people yelling at them” which is, holy fuck, the most blockable thing I’ve ever seen

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago

ah yeah, i blocked that guy a while ago lol

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can't find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery

this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Looked at Grummz twitter, and looks like Notch is also getting involved. With friends like that.

Amazing how this new crop of outrage merchants who touched some game code in the past make Derek Smart look measured and well balanced.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 14 hours ago

This is fucking hilarious. GIT is my favorite blockchain

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 10 points 14 hours ago

god these people are fucking losers

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

a user called "crypto-bitcoin" raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility List

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 9 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

See image description below

Image descriptionImage shows user joined two weeks ago.
.
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope it's a troll)

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 9 hours ago

a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

“GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 11 points 20 hours ago

No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.